Ammassalik Museum

The Ammassalik Museum is a small but absorbing institution covering the traditional life of the East Greenland Inuit, the history of European contact, and the dramatic cultural transformation of the 20th century. The collection includes kayaks, clothing, tools, and objects from traditional hunting culture that was still largely intact when the first permanent Danish settlement was established here in 1894.

The displays cover the drum dance tradition, the belief system involving the tupilak (spirit beings), and the practical ingenuity that allowed people to survive in one of the world's most demanding environments. The museum is compact enough to cover in an hour, but the quality of the objects and their context is high. Staff can usually answer questions about current local life as well as history.

things to do museum
A story
The museum holds one of the most dramatic objects in Greenlandic history: the first drum dance mask ever collected by a European, gathered by Gustav Holm during his 1884-85 expedition that made first contact with the isolated Ammassalik Inuit. The local people had never seen a European before Holm arrived, and the masks he brought back to Denmark — depicting spirits, half-human and half-beast — transformed Western understanding of Inuit spiritual life.